Gutai

Save Cooper Union! A large group of Cooper students and three faculty members have taken over President Jamshed Bharucha’s office, in the hopes of forcing his resignation. They report to Gothamist that they’re willing to stay as long as necessary. While Bharucha inherited massive debt, some off-the-record reports make it sound an awful lot like he’s got blood on his hands. You can follow Free Cooper Union on twitter, livestream, and facebook.

Save the library! Mira Schor reported from a small, poorly-attended protest yesterday to save the New York Public Library, and from the sounds of it, it’s not going well. The Central Library Plan involves demolishing the historic stacks and shipping 1.5 million books to a storage space in New Jersey. [A Year of Positive Thinking]

It’s official: come fall, Postmasters will open in its new home at 54 Franklin Street in Tribeca, a 4,500-square-foot ground floor space with Corinthian columns and sofas. [Postmasters]

Running for mayor seems like a game of who can apologize the most. In a public forum held this week, New York mayoral candidate Joe Lhota apologized for waging war with the Brooklyn Museum in the 1990s. While deputy mayor to Rudy Giuliani, the city pulled the museum’s funding; in turn, the museum sued. Lhota then went on to put his foot in his mouth during the same conference, referring to the Port Authority police force as “mall cops”. [New York Daily News]

There’s some secret art to be found at Chelsea’s Waterside Park Playground. From 4-8 PM on Friday, the park will be home to Jasper Spicero’s “Open Shape”, an undercover exhibition of 3-D printed objects. Here’s what “Open Shape” looked like in Wichita, Kansas. [Jasper Spicero]

The Guggenheim’s “Gutai: Splendid Playground” closed yesterday, but Ben Davis summed up the entire exhibition quite nicely. Gutai fizzled out in the early 1970s due to a split among factions: those who didn’t mind making tech-inspired work for government-sponsored exhibitions, and those who thought that conflicted with their progressive ideals. Today, Davis writes, Western artists are only beginning to understand Gutai’s lesson: “the price paid when critical art becomes repurposed as high-tech entertainment.” [ARTINFO]

Is Helen Frankenthaler good or just influential? We still can’t tell from Roberta Smith’s descriptive review. [NY Times]

This one’s better. Smith reviews Virginia Overton’s spare but memorable show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, helping us to solve the mystery of the coffee maker and the bathtub. We’ll have more on that in our upcoming “We Went to Chelsea.” [NY Times]

And because we love Roberta Smith so much, her thoughts on MoCA’s problems. Our favorite bit is when she describes Deitch’s greatest mistake as being optimistic and naive enough to take the job in the first place. She also is very clear that board member Eli Broad is the biggest problem this museum has. [NYTimes]

I want to see a contemporary art show in Boston. Robyn Day offers a clear and satisfying review of “Me Love You Long Time,” a campy-sounding show about sex work and the sex trade, from artists and activists. Sounds like playful engagement with the real world that we’re missing from Chelsea. [Big Red & Shiny]

YUHUHUCK. Rattlesnake hearts, and other snake-related photos, in Matt Eich’s Instagram coverage of the annual Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup in Texas. [The New Yorker]

Between Gutai and Yevgeniy Fiks, Tyler Green has a strong program in his latest podcast, and, in a leader of ledes, manages to segue from that Wegman puppy GIF to Matisse sculpture. *Snaps*. [MAN, podcast] [MAN, Wegman]

Feared critic Charlie Finch, recently of Artnet, writes a brief, but flaming defense of longtime Artnet editor and painter Walter Robinson’s paintings now up at Dorian Grey Gallery. He claims: “Yet, if only by osmosis, the great ironists of figuration, Currin, Peyton and Yuskavage and their legions of inferiors, owe everything to Walter’s painting, while , as his new show proves, he remains a better painter than them!” [anaba]

The great author Chinua Achebe died today at the age of 82. Now’s a great time to reread “Things Fall Apart.” [CNN]